Now Man (Kiss Not)*

Home Is For Miles

Those buildings so painfully foreign
Of your life scarred and grown
Inwardly recalling them in pieces
I became afraid
At a meaning of light grown
To the symmetries of
Daytime
In the impoverished nation.

Time sifted into time as it lives
In itself and we it
Standing for, standing against
That light so painfully foreign
To all be is
The apprehension of forms ruined by no one
All.


Pages

Boning then
In some sense of the past
Legions go to harm to whip

At the first alarm of vanishing signage
The semaphore meaning
To kill every last one

Blinks unwittingly whose every tic
Of variant cane
Bears witness to the pirated

Echo of these pages
Waste products of more
Primitive accumulations.


Fluff-a-nutting

How we would ever think to hide
In words “hellebore,” “hello”
Helter-skelter seeking shades
Private no more
The nose runs blood from this

Roses, Hellebore, hella’ bored
Words clip their own hair
Cultivating a fence linked
By twinkie intuition
And defeat.

The twitch of his nose
Grows like Pinocchio’s
Doing it sideways
To the slinky rhythms
Of late machines.

This latest paradise
Being close to what was meant
Through the walls of ourselves
Heavy petting
& patty cakes.

Rimbaud
Of all our pretty things
Thick and thicker
Thickest starlets
You stick too much to this mold.


Pay Attention Motherfucker

This zone around the word
Its staying power leaves
From a place of fading substitution
For the subject’s watched-for back.

This is just to say
They shoot all night
At shadows on sheets
As though they weren’t cast
By intelligent things.

My body no longer
Follows me round
This corner upon seeing
Anything at all I knew
I was the first
I was the last to leave.


Tween and not so
So many chiefly
Filling the ditch with a hole
Not expending too soon
The meadows of our need
The truth like sorrow
Being all too sticky


Please Pay Attention Please

The position of the camera
Is the only
Trace
Of an un-
Skeptical
Mind.

The eye goes first, then the
Fist – ah!
We want love, we
Remember love
As the mask of the lost
Waxen and everywhere
But where we, negligible, step.

To be
Any
Nearer
However
Wouldn’t
Be to
Communicate
The predominate
Urge
To be implacably near.


Obselescent Choreographies

The people a corridor moulds us to be
Objects frozen by labyrinthine glass, by optical fibers
Would we appear erstwhile any intelligent design amnesiacs and claustrophobes?


(Un-)Mending Wall

Is he sinking into the floor
Or rising from it?
The still has changed
Waves of light outside these caves
Photographs of them.

As the entrance grows near
The heart beats a little
For never having been here
As the entrance grows near
Penetrate my ear
As music made by a lost year.

This sense of discovery is
Of tethers that free
The organs to leave
And anyone to arrest
The mind with their unwilling.

This sense of loss
Is of leaves to love
Is to go into any situation
Not wanting to kill
And being so unprepared.

A mode of seeing is not heard
The lips are tired of waiting to know
The terms of their custody
As neighbors we go to blows
Over who has the right to say
“I kiss not these lips.”


Pity

I’m not picky, really
I feel bad
For the way you move
Under the bright
Bright lights
Ceaselessly bugged.

I’m not picky
And the fog-
Machine’s not on
Really.

Yet you dare
A sense-
Less dance
Never done
With the tears of
Your undoing.


*composed Spring 2004.